Weekly Update
Thanks to everyone who showed up at the Cooperative Research Summit
down in Cape May. It was great to see some familiar faces and meet some
new people too. Special thanks to Captain Rob Jarmol for his
contribution to the afternoon discussion panel about how environmental
information helps improve fishing and Dr. John Wilkin for his
presentation about incorporating eMOLT data into the Doppio forecast
model.
For those of you down in New Jersey who don’t have temperature
systems yet, thanks for your interest in helping with the project. We’ll
be working to secure some funding for new hardware down that way. It
could be a little while before any is available, but we will keep you in
the loop.
One comment that came up a few times from the industry members in the
room was that we need to do a better job of making data products
available to our industry collaborators. Some of your suggestions
included
- Making the forecast gifs available more frequently
- Making shapefiles of model outputs available for chartplotters
- Zooming in to specific areas of interest in the models
- Displaying the full water column, not just surface or bottom
temps
Because the model outputs are pretty complicated, a lot of this will
take us time to work up, but I’m happy to say that we are already making
some headway. Earlier this week, the team at Lowell Instruments started
making some software tweaks to integrate the regional forecast gif into
our deckbox software. Once that’s ready, we’ll have a new tab on the
deckbox to view the most up to date forecast each time your box powers
up in cell range.
We also put together a first attempt at zooming in on an area of
interest suggested by Captain Brady on the F/V Salted. Below is a
graphic of bottom temperatures between Baltimore Canyon and Spencer
Canyon. If you have an area you’d like to see closer up, please feel
free to reach out.
Baltimore to Spencer Canyon Bottom Temperature Forecast

Announcements and Other News
The Commercial Fisheries Research Foundation is hosting several
workshops in March to help understand how changing ocean conditions
might impact the scallop fishery and the communities it supports.
Workshops will take place on March 19, 21, and 22, and will focus on how
the industry can help monitor these impacts and adapt to them. For more
information, please visit the CFRF
website or contact Victoria
Thomas.
On-demand lobster and Jonah crab gear testing is underway off
Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Science Center scientists are working
with commercial lobster vessels to test on-demand (ropeless) fishing
gear in state and federal waters normally closed to lobster and Jonah
crab fishing with static vertical lines. Testing in this area will occur
through April 30, 2024.

Because on-demand gear has no surface buoys, it won’t be visible at
the surface. To visualize the gear positions and orientations, mariners
can download and subscribe to the EdgeTech Trap Tracker app ($25) on the
Apple
or Google
Play app stores. For more information on this work, click here.
Mariners: There is a potential gear conflict area immediately west of
the Great South Channel in former Groundfish Closed Area 1. On-demand
gear in that area is set northwest to southeast in trawls approximately
1.5 nautical miles in length. If anyone accidentally tows up the
on-demand gear, don’t discard it. Hold onto the gear and contact our
Gear Research Team. Contact info can be found here.
All the best,
-George and JiM